The present invention relates generally to integrated circuits, and more particularly to an integrated circuit graphics display system.
Graphics display systems are typically used in television control electronics, such as set top boxes, integrated digital TVs, and home network computers. Graphics display systems typically include a display engine that may perform display functions. The display engine is the part of the graphics display system that receives display pixel data from any combination of locally attached video and graphics input ports, processes the data in some way, and produces final display pixels as output.
This application includes references to both graphics and video, which reflects in certain ways the structure of the hardware itself. This split does not, however, imply the existence of any fundamental difference between graphics and video, and in fact much of the functionality is common to both. Graphics as used herein may include graphics, text and video.
The present invention provides a graphics display system having a novel video scaler. The video scaler determines whether it will require less memory bandwidth to scale a video image before writing the video image to memory or after reading the video image from memory. The video scaler includes a scaler engine that scales the video image either before writing the video image to memory or after reading the video image from memory, depending on which operation requires less memory bandwidth.